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This article is from January 15, 2003, and is no longer current.

Photoshop How-To: The Power of Hue and Saturation Adjustment

1

I have been using the Hue and Saturation Adjustment tools that Photoshop provides for a long time. Usually I am just making overall image adjustments, but from time-to-time there is a specific area of an image that needs adjustment when the rest of the image should stay the same. Here’s how to do that.

Figure 1

In the photo above (see figure 1), I want to change the hue of the pill in the foreground from green to blue. But I don’t want to mess with the rest of the image too much. So how do I do that? The first thing to do is to open the Hue and Saturation adjustment box. Go Image->Adjust->Hue and Saturation.

Figure 2

Figure 2 shows the dialog box that appears when you have done the previous steps. I have already made some adjustments but let me explain what I did.

  1. The first thing I did was to change the color edit drop down menu to Greens. This will allow me to make adjustments to the green pixels in the image.
  2. Once I have selected green as my editing choice, I can use the ink dropper tool that Photoshop automatically provides me to select the green in the pill. I had to try a few times to get it in the right place.
  3. Once I had selected the correct green hue, I just made some Hue adjustments by sliding the Hue slider to the right. I also made some slight adjustments with the other sliders. The actual adjustments are up to you, of course.

Figure 3

You can see my results in figure 3. Using the Hue and Saturation tools to adjust images is a very powerful way of making subtle changes to an overall image. It can also save you a lot of time if you have a single entity like this one that needs changing.

Another thing you can do with the Hue and Saturation is to colorize an image. The next exercise shows you how.


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